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Not that it was intentional! I’m away at the moment, and all my pre-planned cartoonery is languishing on a remote PC which is suddenly no longer responding. Urgent calls to house-sitters for reboots notwithstanding, it would seem that Twiggles and Cobbe are getting an unplanned break from the limelight for a week or so.

A few days back, a certain long-time reader, software guru and all-round nice guy (you know who you are, mr mouser) made a brilliant suggestion. Well, two in fact, and I’m going to take both on-board as follows:

Suggestion One: Competition! Do you have an idea for a Head in the Clouds strip? It can be as specific or as nebulous as you like. Maybe you have already thought of a complete strip and would simply like to have it drawn up, or perhaps there’s a scene or situation you’d like to see Twiggles and Cobbe placed in.

Send in your ideas and over the next few weeks I’ll pick out some winners, and hopefully draw them well enough to bring your ideas to life.

Winners will receive their strip on a T-shirt or mug or something similar: I’ll see what can be arranged…

… Hence Suggestion Two: Leading on from that, I’ll set up a CafePress account so that you can get your favourite Head in the Clouds strips printed on all sorts of loot. Look out for an announcement shortly which will tell you how to make the magic happen.

Well, almost. At the time of writing this, it’s just day away from the first anniversary of the strip. That was a bit of a surprise when I looked back - it only feels like a little while ago that I launched the cartoon.

I’m sure you’ll have noticed quite a change in the style of the comic. Nick’s taking some time off from the strip, so unfortunately I’ll be doing the “artwork” from now on. Not quite got the hang of the poor fellas yet: for some reason, Cobbe looks much younger, and as for Twiggles… well, for something that looks like a cue ball with wings and a beak, he’s pretty tricky to draw!

A week or two back, one of our regulars asked how Nick and I “work” together at creating Head in the Clouds.

It’s actually a pretty simple process. I have a long list of ideas which I believe will work for the strip, to which I add whenever the muse strikes (she’s pretty casual). This gives me enough material to have quite a few strips drawn out in advance. Every few weeks I just scratch out several onto scrap paper to see if they look ok. These get scanned and uploaded to Nick for his perusal.

I think this is useful, since obviously not all of the ideas are any good, or even slightly funny, so it gives Nick a chance to pick and choose ones that he hopefully also thinks work for the strip before he sits down and starts drawing “for real.”

Here’s an example of the sort of thing that I send over for him to work from. How he turns this into the finished article I’ll never know:

Storyboard for strip dated 29th January 2009 - click the image to see it full-size

Once Nick’s picked ones he can bear to draw, he usually does two or three at a time, and often a couple of variants for each - minor changes to the image itself, or to the dialogue if it seems a bit clunky. This is usually a few days before they’re due to be uploaded to the site.

At this point we have short discussion on any changes required, although actually I’m usually so pleased with what he’s done that it’s simply ready to go in my opinion.

Right now I’ve about another 50 or so storyboards in the pipeline, and I’m trying to maintain that sort of level to maximise the chances of actually stumbling across an amusing one

Thank you very much for your continued support, contributions and feedback over the last few months. As we approach the new year (and our 50th strip!) we would just like to wish you all a very Happy Holidays and a peaceful 2009.